Prospectus Section 1: Basic Aims and Proposed Argument

Part 1:

The roots of science fiction, as with all genres, have no clear origin, but one might point to the late Victorian period as one possible point of origin.  Popular fiction of this period right around the turn of the century, while not identifying itself as part of a singular genre called science fiction, combined the scientific and the supernatural in a way not previously done.

The novel across Victorian England, of course, both high brow and low, exhibited a complicated hybridity of genres; genres that stand alone in other literary periods become, in the Victorian age, modes competing against other modes in a single text.  Strains of the Gothic, sensation fiction, detective fiction, science fiction, the Romantic, the melodramatic, etc., all circulated simultaneously and fluidly.  This heteroglossia of genres in the novel fostered a literary environment in which the complex relationship between the scientific and the supernatural could precipitate.  Novels during this time did not imitate the Gothic or other genres that had previously engaged and employed the supernatural, but rather they mutated in reaction to numerous and significant developments in science, technology, psychology, economics, and sociology.  To some, whose preoccupation is with taxonomy and categorization, this relationship might mark the birth of science fiction. 

But the aim of this dissertation is not to identify the origins of the science fiction genre or engage at all in such a debate.  It will instead look at a set of closely related texts that have, in studies in Victorian literature, only recently been regarded as part of the period's literary canon, particularly when considering mainstream fictional realism.  Situating these texts in their very specific literary history will then open up questions about several much larger histories - the history of the novel as a genre and a form, the history of genre in general, the history of science fiction, the history of realism, and the history of supernatural vs. scientific discourse.  By examining these texts not to construct a clean lineage of any one genre or literary historical period but to synchronically commentate on dynamic literary historical trends, I hope to show that these popular novels, commonly essentialized as anti-realist, can contribute to a dialogue on realism.  In many ways I will show that late Victorian popular fiction must participate in conversations about realism.